The Young Australian Skeptics is an organisation and group blog run by a diverse team of young science communicators, professionals and students, focused on the crossroads of science with critical thinking, religion, education, politics, medicine, law, wider society and more — in essence, scientific skepticism and its cultural impact.

Question of the Week: Unnecessary Science Funding

Every week we ask a question of our audience to stimulate discussion and critical thinking about an issue or topic relating to science, skepticism, technology or religion. Our favourite comments are discussed on our podcast, The Pseudoscientists!

Science can be expensive. As someone who spends a lot of time in a molecular biology laboratory, I can attest to how much money it costs to have good speciality equipment, reagents, tools and labs themselves. In an ideal world, there would be enough funding for every single scientific project… but we don’t live in an ideal world and concessions have to happen. Imagine you were in charge of the New World Order/​Illuminati/​Shadowy Cabal and had the power to allocate our world’s limited funds to the scientific disciplines of your choice: what would you leave out?

Which branch of scientific research should get the least amount of funding?

You might have a personal grudge against a discipline, or perhaps you think it’s not an area worth pursuing. Either way, a tough decision must be made…

About the author:

Jack Scanlan

Jack is a writer, podcaster and insect geneticist, and happens to be the President of the Young Australian Skeptics. Don’t make him choose between science, music and comedy – that’d be a terrible thing to do. Visit full profile »

Not that I think anything should be cut and I think that there is yet to be more things that could come from this area, but the so-​​far rather fruitless research into SCAMs (supplements, complementary & alternative modalities).

http://lukefreeman.com.au/ Luke Freeman

…and Wind Turbine Syndrome, Wifi Sensitivity, health risks of water fluoridation and vaccinations!! Pretty much anything that the pollies are promising to research that is done and dusted and they’re just pandering to the crazy.

http://fods12.podbean.com/ James Fodor

I made some remarks a while back arguing that a study of acupuncture at the University of Melbourne should not be something that receives funding, and I was surprised about how much disagreement I got even from my more skeptical friends. But I would put that forward as a prime example of a type of research that should not be funded — basically any type of medicinal treatment or intervention that has no prior plausibility at all and completely contradicts everything we know about science and medicine.

I would say that more generally medicine is probably overfunded compared to many other types of scientific research. This may be controversial, but I actually think many types of social science are underfunded. We spend billions of dollars every year trying to cure cancer and other really difficult and expensive diseases, but very little on conducting sophisticated studies to attempt to figure out how to better organise and run our governments, or how to reduce domestic violence, or how to promote economic development in underdeveloped countries.

I guess talking about what should get more funding isn’t really answering the question, but I don’t think you can really say which types of science are overfunded without saying which alternative branches of science are underfunded in comparison — they are two sides of the same coin. So my basic argument would be that medicine and perhaps certain branches of physics (e.g. subatomic physics with the LHC) are relatively overfunded compared to many branches of the social sciences, given the potential for marginal return per dollar invested.

L.Long

NONE of the WooWoo stuff should get any funding. If someone wants funding then 1st SHOW with positive proof they work then we can talk. Example…the guy who stated that the continents moved got nothing but ridicule. But once a mechanism was found that allowed this to be explained and shown to work, then the geologists got funding for further study.
Things like fruit fly research may sound silly but it will find something useful as it is really a part of reality unlike psychics.